Soulthieves.

[joshksingh]

I am disgustingly considering restoring a separate teleportation magic skill. I was thinking about it in the can and the mechanics are making sense to me again. I'd call it Translocation rather than Telomancy, mainly for greater accuracy. First of all, Translocation doesn't just move a body like Enchantment would; it actually blinks it from one spatial location to another, like the sci fi hyperspatial jump. If you had cameras on locations A and B and you started at A at time t, and you translocated, you'd practically be at B at time t (in reality it'd be t+x, but x should be so small as to be negligible). There's no in-between: you start at one point, and suddenly you're at another. This may not in itself be sufficient for distinction of translocations from Enchantment, but it's not a bad argument; the difference might indicate a fundamental technical difference.

A stronger argument is that translocations require a fixed spatiotemporal reference point; you can only translocate relative to something else, after all. It has this in common with Sensory Extension, strangely. Enchantments, conjurations and polymorphisms, on the other hand, can be cast more arbitrarily. That is to say, practitioners of those three arts don't need to invest any mental resources into identifying a reference point and then conducting their magic around that; they cast the spell and that is that. What happens, happens.

So, distinguishing the secondary elemental magic skills (technical) will require an additional criterion: Do spells of this category require a fixed spatiotemporal reference point?

Conjuration:
Energy: invoked
Tangible? yes
S-T reference point: dynamic
Direction: outward

Polymorphism:
Energy: sublimated
Tangible? yes
S-T reference point: dynamic
Direction: outward

Enchantment:
Energy: sublimated
Tangible? no
S-T reference point: dynamic
Direction: outward

Translocation:
Energy: sublimated
Tangible? no
S-T reference point: fixed
Direction: outward

Sensory Extension:
Energy: sublimated
Tangible? no
S-T reference point: fixed
Direction: inward

SkillDirectly
invoked?Results
tangible?Fixed
reference?Results
internal?
ConjurationXX
PolymorphismX
Enchantment
TranslocationX
Sensory ExtensionXX

The patterns worked out nicely here, didn't they? It seems to suggest I'm onto something.

I guess I'll add it, then. Good thing I archived the previous copy of the manual.